If you like full-screen photo browsing, you’ll love PicLens! PicLens has been around for several months for Mac users, and just a couple of weeks ago they released a version for Firefox users. Made by the Cooliris team (our review here), PicLens enables you to view photos in full-screen mode with just one click.
Get Started
All you have to do is go to www.piclens.com and click “download PicLens for Firefox.” If you’re using a Mac, you’ll notice a link right below the Firefox download which is what you’ll use. Once the plug-in is installed, you’re ready to head-off to one of their supported sites to give it a try.
Currently they support Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, Yahoo Images, Friendster, Picasa Web Albums, and any site that enables Media RSS. I decided to go over to my Flickr account to give it a try. All you have to do is hover over an image and then a translucent “play button” appears (pictured to the right). Click it and your full-screen photo browsing experience begins!
What’s great about it is that you can play it as a slideshow or just click the images to manually go through them yourself. While Flickr has a built-in slideshow feature, I found the PicLens experience even better.
Dual Monitor Set-up
If you have a dual monitor set-up, it works beautifully! I had my browser open on one monitor, and full-screen mode opened on the other monitor. Perfect!
Google and Yahoo Images
As mentioned, they currently support Google Images and Yahoo images. I see this as one of the more practical uses for PicLens that many people would be able to use. I like it because I get a better idea of what the picture looks like without having to click on the little thumbnail to see the full-size version to determine if it’s an image I want to use or not.
Wrapping it up
I have only been using PicLens for the last several hours, but I love it. PicLens is smooth, simple to use, and actually saved me some time. I frequent Google Images at least several times a day, and PicLens has made it so easy to browse through all the images to find one that suits my needs best.
Facebook fans, you’re sure to love it as well because we all know how many photos albums are on Facebook, and now you can browse through all of those photos in full-screen mode.
Best of all, it’s free.
Download PicLens for Firefox here.
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Tags: Web Sites, Facebook, Flickr, Photos
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I tried it and it screwed my monitor so bad I had to reboot.
I’ll try it again after a few updates to see if I can manage to use it.
The idea is pretty cool and I hope it expands to other services
Went to about 50 websites and not one displayed the arrow to start PicLens. Furthermore “options” for the extension is greyed out.
Guess it might of value sometime in the future when programmers start compatability. In the meantime I’ve uninstalled it.
Wow, that is super odd. I can’t believe an extension could mess things up that bad!
It looks like they just jumped for support on the most popular sites like Flickr, but I’m sure they will continue to add support for other sites.
Milesch: Keep in mind that currently they only support Flickr, Facebook, Google Images, Yahoo Images, Friendster, Picasa Web Albums, and any site that enables Media RSS.
Just realized that PicLens prevents the middle mouse button from being a double click when in Firefox 2.0.0.14. So have again disabled it.